Explaining to Kids Helps Cognitive Growth

The title on this article "In Defense of Permissive Parenting: Why Talking Back May Lead to Smarter Kids" is not accurate. Explaining things to your children is not "Permissive Parenting".

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thehumancondition/archive/2009/10/21/in-defense-of-permissive-parenting-why-talking-back-may-lead-to-smarter-kids.aspx

Posted Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:20 PM
Tony Dokoupil

Inside a convenience store, Xenia is battling her 4-year-old son, Paulino, over buying a soft drink. She wants him to try a small size, he wants a larger one. "That one does not work," she says, referring to the rack of big cups. "These [smaller] ones do."

Xenia eventually won the battle over beverages, but she may have lost the parenting war, according to a pair of new studies, highlighting how small differences in communication style can have a large impact on kids. And in many cases, it's minority families like this one (Xenia and Paulino are Mexican-American) that suffer the most.

Moms, dads, or caregivers who mainly talk to their offspring using commands, like Xenia, who was cited in the study, rather than reasoning may get their kids to do what they want, but they also fail to develop their children’s minds, the research out of the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA suggests.

The findings have particular significance for minority communities where do-as-I-say exchanges have long predominated over more nuanced argument. But they may also resonant with policy wonks, as Washington debates whether to expand publicly funded preschool programs. Reading, singing, dancing and other activities at the heart of the government’s multi-billion-dollar Head Start program may help low-income kids aged zero to 5. But a crucial link, these studies suggest, is coaching parents to explain decisions with their children─and letting them talk back, at least just a little bit.

In one of the studies due out early next year in the journal of Developmental Psychology, researchers spent more than a year studying two dozen Mexican-American families, observing real-world mother-child interactions like those between Xenia and Paulino. Mexican-American kids were found to spend around twice as much time watching television than reading. But the study's most striking results had to do with parenting techniques. Of the more than 1,400 exchanges that researchers documented of a mother wanting her child to do something, a mere 8 percent included "reasoning," while just 9 percent included clarification of what the child should be doing instead. By far the biggest category was "direct verbal commands,” which accounted for 42 percent of parenting efforts. (Incidentally, the overall success rate with these strategies was almost 75 percent.) Other studies have found that white parents deploy reasoning techniques more than a third of the time—"inviting more complex thought and language development" as they do so, according to Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley professor of education and public policy, who coauthored the research.

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